


Happily Ever After Below The Waist!

by pocketmumbles (livelikejack)



Series: Not Your Favorite Record [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Crack, Drinking, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 06:53:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3968599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livelikejack/pseuds/pocketmumbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While on the Can’t Go Back Tour, Malia Tate drank:<br/>- shots of COLDCOCK Whiskey<br/>- shots of Jameson<br/>- shots of Glenlivet Scotch<br/>- numerous beers throughout the day<br/>- and a body shot off Stiles Stilinski</p><p>and then retold the History of Alpha/Beta…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happily Ever After Below The Waist!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fenhalam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenhalam/gifts).



> This is crack. And this is terrible crack, on top of that. Rated T because Malia is very inebriated and swears a lot.
> 
> Inspired entirely by [Brendon Urie's Drunk History of Fall Out Boy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjmXSJ_onTk). I highly recommend watching that before reading this, because this fic won't make any sense without it. (And honestly, it probably still won't make any sense _with_ it.)
> 
> Continuation of "This Is A Love Song In My Own Way," which is why this fic title is from the lyrics right after it in ["Bang the Doldrums" by Fall Out Boy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C8f29nPyRk). Slight expansion of the story's universe, but in a hazy, drunken, crack way. Nothing actually happens below the waist here, because this is a drunken retelling. Squint-and-you-miss-it **background Malia/Stiles**.
> 
> Birthday present for Alex! I promise I will eventually tell the story of these two losers soberly and in much greater detail.

While on the Can’t Go Back Tour, Malia Tate drank:

  * shots of COLDCOCK Whiskey
  * shots of Jameson
  * shots of Glenlivet Scotch
  * numerous beers throughout the day
  * and a body shot off Stiles Stilinski



and then retold the History of Alpha/Beta…

 

* * *

 

_“Okay, so, so, so. Okay.” Malia sets down the plastic cup on the table and smears the back of her hand across her mouth. “So the story of Alpha/Beta…begins with the alphabet. Because there’s, like, there’s Greek letters and stuff, and they’re really fucking cool and when you stick them together it kind of looks like a fish with a butt…”_

_Stiles’ voice cuts in, faint and somewhere behind the camera. “The buttfish didn’t come until later.”_

_Malia’s eyebrow arches. “You’re right,” she grins, and shoots finger guns somewhere to the side of the camera. “Buttfish was way later. Okay, so Alpha/Beta began with…it began with these two losers hanging out in the woods.”_

 

The two losers crunched through the brittle winter leaves coating the forest floor. It was the middle of winter, like, dead of winter, like, dead as those dead leaves they just trampled all over, crunch crunch crunch. There wasn’t any snow, though, because they lived in a totally lame part of the States that, like, _never_ snowed. It was so lame.

 

_“Hey.”_

_“I’m just telling it like it is, Derek,” Malia sniffs, then turns back to the camera._

 

Scott shivered a little as he sat down on a fallen log, swinging his guitar down from his back. “Are you sure we’re even allowed to be here?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s totally fine,” Stiles said. “Like, it’s a Preserve, right? Everyone’s allowed in the Preserve.” He squinted up at the sunlight, then pulled out his camera. “Alright, this video’s gonna be great.”

“We could’ve just filmed this in my room like all the other ones.”

“Change of scenery, Scott!” Stiles crowed. “Your viewers will thank you for it.”

Scott shrugged and started playing. Wait, wait, he had to tune his guitar first, because it was winter and the cold affects guitar strings, that’s important to know. So then he started playing, and the song was…well, it was beautiful. It was beautiful. Incandescent. Transcendent. Iridescent.

 

_“I don’t think a song can be iridescent.”_

_“Shut up, Liam. You weren’t even born when this happened.”_

_“It happened, like, ten years ago.”_

_Malia nods and taps the side of her nose smugly. Or, well, she probably tries to tap the side of her nose, but mostly just ends up swiping herself in the eye. “Exactly.”_

Anyway, the song was beautiful. It was absolutely beautiful, just, just fucking amazing, okay…except for the lyrics. The lyrics sucked sweaty balls. Sweaty, hairy, dangly balls. They were terrible. Just godawful. Eighteen-year-old Scott’s lyrics were just…yeesh. Yeah, that sums them up pretty well. _Yeesh_.

In fact, the lyrics were so ghastly that they summoned a hermit out of the woods. He, like, literally popped out of a tree or something just to tell Scott how terrible his lyrics were.

“I, like, literally popped out of a tree or something to tell you how terrible your lyrics are,” a voice said.

Scott stopped playing mid-strum, twisted around to find the source of the voice, and fell off the log with a yelp.

Derek Hale, who wasn’t actually a hermit but _was_ a twenty-year-old loser who lived at his mom’s house in the woods, glared down at Scott and didn’t even offer to help him up. “Your lyrics are terrible,” Derek said. “Also, this is private property.”

“Told you we shouldn’t be here,” Scott muttered to Stiles as he gathered up his guitar. “Thanks for the feedback,” he added to Derek.

Derek crossed his arms and glared harder, probably. “Did you write that song?”

“Whatever, yeah,” Scott said with a twitchy shrug. “I know, it sucks.”

“The lyrics suck,” Derek agreed. “You should rewrite them. The song deserves better.” And then he vanished into _thin fucking air_.

Or, like, he turned around and walked back to his house.

Scott and Stiles boggled after him. After a long moment of gaping their mouths open like fish, Scott finally demanded, “…What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

 

_“And that would’ve been the end of it!” Malia exclaims, throwing her arms wide. “That would’ve been the beginning and end of Alpha/Beta! Except Scott McCall was a ginormous klutz, and when he fell off the log, he dropped his inhaler. That shit’s expensive, you know. And then Derek Hale found the inhaler in a pile of dead leaves or some shit, and he was like, ‘Oh shit! This shit’s hella expensive, I better give this back to S. McCall!’ And so he finally stopped being a loser hermit and ventured into town to track down this S. McCall with shitty buttfish lyrics and a throat of gold.”_

_“A_ throat _of gold? Really?”_

_Malia tips back more of her beer. “Shut up, Stiles.”_

_“I was never a loser hermit.”_

_“Who’s telling the story here, Derek?”_

 

* * *

 

_Malia stares at the camera for a long moment, gaze inscrutable. Then she abruptly bursts into laughter. “Shut up!” she squeaks, bent over double in her chair while she giggles into the cushions. “It’s not funny!” She giggles harder. _“_ Stop laughing! _”__

 

* * *

 

Scott opened his front door and nearly passed out from shock to see Derek Hale glowering down at him. Lightning flashed ominously behind him, probably because Derek’s secret superpower was his ability to time events of the very cosmos for maximum dramatic effect. “What the hell?” Scott gasped, staring wide-eyed at Derek. Which was actually an impressive feat, because Scott himself was currently sporting a giant floof of hair that could possibly be argued for viable sentiency by how much it seemed to be eating his head alive. The fact that Scott could see at all through the majestic cloud surrounding his head was astounding.

 

_“Oh, and Derek had that, like, unicorn horn hair pointy thing going on,” Malia adds. She tilts her hands over the front of her head in a steeple. “You remember that? That hair gel unicorn pointy hair goodness.”_

_“Like a reverse ducktail.”_

_“Yes!” Malia leans forward and high-fives Stiles’ disembodied hand. “Ducktail unicorn hair. Exactly.”_

 

“What the hell?” Scott gasped, again, because repeating lines made them more dramatic, especially if there was a commercial break in between.

Derek thrust his fist out at Scott and – oh, oh, it wasn’t actually a fist at all, but rather a hand wrapped around an expensive inhaler. “You dropped this yesterday.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“And your song lyrics still suck,” Derek added in a voice like a thundercloud, or maybe like when a skateboard skidded over loose gravel at the park.

“Well, fuck you,” Scott said, or maybe he didn’t because he was a nice guy like that, but he was probably thinking it. And then Derek sneezed in his face because he’d been standing in the pouring rain like a giant loser, so Scott peered around him and asked, “Um, where’s your car?”

Derek blinked. “I walked here.”

“Oh.” Scott contemplated the thunderstorm outside, and Derek’s completely-soaked hair still managing to defy gravity, and probably Scott’s inner Mom yelling at him to find the man a towel already, and then he opened the front door a little wider. “Thanks for finding my inhaler. You, uh, wanna hang out here until the rain lets up?”

The rain did not, in fact, let up until late afternoon the next day. And by that time, Scott and Derek had learned three things about each other: that their music tastes were so similar that they didn’t notice they’d accidentally stolen each other’s iPods until a week later, that playing off of each other’s riffs came so naturally that they might as well have been strapped into one of those giant Pacific Rim robot things, and that Scott’s mom definitely did not appreciate their impromptu guitar/synthesizer cover of “Plug In Baby” at one in the morning.

 

 _“So they started hanging out and jamming together!” Malia says. “They were playing, like, Blink-182 and Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins and then Derek was like, ‘Hey, let’s play something new. Lemme hear your shitty song.’ And then he, like, he like sat down in the middle of Scott’s living room and just wrote up some new lyrics_ on the spot _. And that’s how ‘Pilot’ was born. Alpha/Beta’s first song.”_

 

* * *

 

_“So they-” Malia pauses, lets out a loud burp, then continues. “So they wrote their first song together, ‘Pilot.’ And it was awesome. I forgot how it goes, but it’s so awesome. And then they wrote a bunch of other songs together, and that became their first album, Love Afraid.”_

_“It’s Love. Be Afraid,” a voice behind the camera says._

_Malia nods. “Love Afraid.”_

_“Love. Be Afraid.”_

_“Yeah, Love Afraid.”_

_“Love-”_

_“It’s called Love Be A Freak,” Malia says loudly. “And it’s fucking awesome.”_  

 

* * *

 

_“The name.” Malia wipes her face with her completely soaked-through shirt. “The name, the name, the name. So Scott was like, ‘Oh shit! We need a name!’”_

 

“Oh shit!” Scott yelled. “We need a name!”

Derek shrugged. He also waved apologetically at the waiter, because they were in the middle of a Red Lobster. He was also wearing a lobster bib, and it was adorable.

Okay, fine, he wasn’t actually wearing a lobster bib. But it would’ve been adorable if he was.

“I don’t know,” Derek said, twitching his eyebrows in an eyebrow version of a shrug. “Don’t look at me, man, I just write the lyrics.”

So they looked at the alphabet. It was on the back of a kid’s menu or something. Derek had probably stolen it from a small child. Scott blinked, then peered up at Derek. “Did you steal this children’s menu from a small child?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Of course not,” he said, which was the exact sort of thing that someone who _had_ stolen a kid’s menu from a small child would say. “Hey, what if, like… _letters_.”

Scott stared at Derek for a long moment. “Did that make sense in your head?”

“But, like, _Greek_ letters,” Derek continued. “Because that’s cooler. Like…I don’t know, like, Alpha/Beta/Gamma.”

“Whoa,” Scott breathed, eyes wide in awe. “That is so cool. But Gamma sucks. We should get rid of Gamma.”

_“And that’s how they became Alpha/Beta,” Malia says. “That’s literally how the conversation went.” She pounds a fist at the camera. “Boom.”_

“Hey,” Stiles said, appearing out of thin air three weeks later at a bar. “Hey, if you put the letters next to each other, it kind of looks like a fish with a butt.”

 

_“And that’s how they also became Buttfish.”_

_A voice next to the camera asks, “Who’s the butt and who’s the fish?”_

_Malia squints for a long moment. Then she yells, “Scott, lemme see your butt!”_  

 

* * *

 

 _“And_ Scott-” _Malia breaks off into giggles, pressing her fist to her mouth. “Scott, like, totally ripped his pants down the ass onstage. Right down the buttcrack. It’s on the DVD and everything!”_

 

Scott straightened slowly. “So, funny story,” he said into the microphone while Derek fiddled around on his bass. The crowd cheered, because everyone loved sweet groovy basslines. “I’m pretty sure I ripped my pants during that last song.”

Derek stepped back a few steps, glanced over, and then the bass riff abruptly cut out. Scott turned his head to see Derek bent over double, practically kneeling on the stage while his shoulders shook with laughter. “How bad is it?”

Instead of answering, Derek flopped over onto his back and cackled harder. “Thanks, Derek,” Scott sighed. “That was very helpful.” Derek flashed him a thumbs up.

Scott turned back to the audience with a shrug. “Well,” he said, and started stripping.

 

_“And no one ever remembers that he ripped his pants!” Malia shouts at the camera. “Because all anyone ever remembers is that time Scott McCall played an entire set wearing nothing but bright pink boyshorts!”_

_“Boxer briefs.”_

_Malia turns. “What?”_

_“They were bright pink boxer briefs.”_

_Malia rolls her eyes so exaggeratedly that she almost tips backwards out of the chair. “Fine, Scott, bright pink_ boxer briefs _. The point is,” she wags a finger at him, then turns and wags it at the camera. “The point is, Scott McCall ripped his pants down the buttcrack and it is my civic duty to make sure no one forgets that.”_

_“And the pink boxer briefs.”_

_She nods sagely. “Yes, Derek,_ and _the pink boxer briefs.”_

 

* * *

 

 _“So then they made_ Trust the – Fuck the – Fuck the Trust – the Instinct _. And_ Trust This Might Hurt _. And they were like smash kabloom all over the charts, like, one, two, five, teeeeeeeeen!” Malia leans back in her chair, arms outstretched, and nearly falls over into a potted plant. “It was so good, they were all over the world, and ‘Omega’ was all over the place, all over the radios, it was fucking amazing._

_“And Isaac Lahey had nothing to do with the entire album!” she shouts, then lets out a loud snicker. “Love you, Isaac,” she giggles, waving her pinky at the camera._

 

* * *

 

_“Tell us about the fourth album.”_

_Malia takes a long drag from her beer, then upends the rest of its contents over her head. “All right. All right, so the fourth album._ This Might Hurt _.”_

_“That was the third album.”_

_“Aw, fuck.”_

 

* * *

 

 _Malia tries to grab her water bottles, knocks it onto the floor instead, and lets out a heavy sigh. “_ Lose Your Mind _was a total psychological mindfuck and no one saw that coming. I was like, ‘What the fuck am I listening to? What the fuck is Scott doing in ‘Insatiable?’ What the fuck?’ But everyone fucking loved it, man. They fucking loved it._

_“And then they went to the fucking Grammys!” Malia spreads her hands while she laughs. “Like, what the fuck, right? And they went, and everyone there was like, ‘Who the fuck are these clowns?’_

_“And then they won Best New Artist and then the entire_ world _was like, ‘No, seriously, who the fuck are these clowns??’ And they were wearing these ugly-ass blue suits that didn’t even fit right and Derek’s hair was dumb and jeez, I just had to tell everyone I wasn’t related to him at all. At all._

 _“But then they actually won like three years later so then I started telling people he was my cousin again.” She shakes her head at the camera. “Distant cousin.”_  

 

* * *

 

_“Where’d my beer go?” Malia demands, shooting upright in her chair. “You took my beer, what the fuck?”_

_“You poured it all over yourself.”_

_“I did?” She pats her soaked-through t-shirt. “Aw, damn. I wanted to drink that.”_

 

* * *

 

_“Hey!” Scott’s voice pipes up from a corner of the room, far away from the camera. “Hey, talk about Stiles!”_

_Malia takes a swig from her beer. “Stiles is ten feet tall and he has five moles on his butt that kind of look like – oh. Oh, you meant, like, Stiles and the_ band _, huh?” She sets her cup down. “Okay. So_ Stiles _was in the band at first. But he’s not anymore, even though he’s sitting right in front of me. Actually, dude.” She breaks into a bright snorting grin, eyes sparkling. “Dude, I totally stole your job. You’re welcome.”_

 

“You know, I’m not actually a drummer,” Stiles said, while he sat behind his drum set and twirled his drumstick between his fingers and the ringing cymbals slowly faded from the song he’d just finished playing. On the drums.

Scott shook his head with a fond grin. “You’re totally a drummer, Stiles,” he said. “You’re _our_ drummer. And you’re awesome!”

“Aw, thanks,” Stiles said, and then they probably beamed sappily at each other for ten minutes straight while Derek rolled his eyes and ate a sandwich. “But seriously, I’m really not that good.”

“He’s right,” Derek said around a mouthful of fluffernutter.

“But I’ve been booking us a bunch of shows and doing, like, managing shit, and I’m kind of thinking I wanna keep doing that instead,” Stiles continued. “You guys can definitely find a better drummer, but you should definitely hire me as your manager.” He snorted. “Let’s be honest. You _need_ me as your manager.”

 

_“So then they got some person to do the drums for the first album and the shows and – wait, that was still Stiles.” Malia tilts her head. “That was Stiles on the first album? No wonder the drums sucked.”_

_“Love you too, babe.”_

_Malia blows a kiss at the camera. “But then Stiles became their manager instead and that’s why the drumming on_ Trust The Instinct _was so good. Because they trusted the instinct to not have Stiles drum anymore.”_

 

* * *

 

_“And they went to the fucking VMAs because ‘Tattoo’ was blowing up all over the place.” She wiggles her fingers in what might be an attempt at jazz hands. “So they were at the VMAs for some reason. And they were like, ‘Why are we at the VMAs? What the fuck.’”_

 

“Why are we at the VMAs?” Derek asked. “What the fuck.”

Scott waved at someone infinitely more famous than him and sat down next to Derek. “It’s cool, though, you know?” he said. “We’re at the _VMAs_.”

“Ten bucks says they get our names backwards on the red carpet recaps.”

“I really liked that one magazine that called me ‘Scoot McHale,’” Scott said. He grinned at Derek. “Hey, just in case we win, do you know what you’re gonna say?”

“We’re not gonna win.”

“Well, yeah,” Scott said. He shrugged. “But just in case it happens, you don’t want to end up just standing there like an idiot.”

 

 _“And then they actually_ won _, and everyone was like, ‘Whattttt?’” Malia snorts, almost spits out a mouthful of beer, then keeps on laughing. “And these two are just tripping their way onto the stage and it takes them, like, a million years to get there because they were seated so far back._

_“But they won, and that’s all that matters. And Scott’s acceptance speech sucked because no one thought that they’d win and Derek literally didn’t talk at all and that’s all that matters.”_

 

* * *

 

_“Wait, what the-” She holds out her completely soaked t-shirt. “The hell is this? Did I puke on myself?”_

_“No, you poured your beer all over yourself.”_

_“I did? Shit.”_  

 

* * *

 

_“Tell us about the break.”_

_“Oh yeah, the break!” Malia flings her legs off the armrest, topples out of the chair, then clambers back into her seat. “Okay, so after Lose Your Mind, Alpha/Beta took a break._ Meaning… _”_

 

“We’re taking a break,” Derek said. He shrugged apathetically, and his hair looked slightly less stupid but it was still pretty stupid. “I just need a break.”

“I’m just gonna go find the music,” Scott said, appearing out of thin air right next to him. His sight line was all wrong, though, because he was way shorter than Derek. Eight inches shorter, minimum. “I’m gonna go find the _art_.”

Derek blinked down at him. “What the hell is that even supposed to _mean?_ ”

 

 _“And the fans were like – oh man.” Malia drags a hand through her hair, then abruptly shoves a lock of it into her mouth and starts chewing on it. “They were losing their minds. It was like, ‘Oh no! Alpha/Beta hasn’t done anything for, like, six months! Are they dead? The band is dead! They’re done! It’s over! This is the end!’ But it_ wasn’t. _” She points at the camera with a triumphant grin that is only slightly undercut by the hair still jammed in her mouth. “It wasn’t the end._

_“Because two years later – one and a half? Three? Shit, whatever – they just, like, drop-kicked an album onto the charts. Didn’t tell anyone, no warning, no prep, just smashed their way back onto the charts. And Scott was like-”_

 

“Derek,” Scott barked into his cell phone. It looked an awful lot like a cordless land phone. “Derek, it’s time for us to get back into this. And we’re gonna go back _strong_.”

Derek nodded into his cell phone, which was actually an overripe banana that he was holding upside down. “But Scott,” he said, while still nodding vigorously, “We _Can’t Go Back_.”

“You’re a goddamn genius! I love you!” Scott yelled into his cell phone, which had somehow morphed into a size ten Converse shoe. Then he dropkicked it into the wall, except he didn’t really manage to kick it so it just sort of weakly bounced off his purple-socked ankle. And then Derek laughed at him so hard that he fell into a table.

_“And boom, just like that, they were back!” Malia yells. “And the charts were like, ‘Whoa!_ Can’t Go Back _! This album’s the motherfucking shit holy balls!’” She counts off songs on her fingers. “Fucking ‘Time of Death,’ ‘Muted,’ ‘Time of Death,’ ‘A Promise To The Dead,’ ‘Time of Death,’ fucking hell. And they won, like, a million Grammys. They won Album of the Year!”_

_“No, we didn’t.”_

_Malia frowns. “You didn’t?”_

_“Yeah, we definitely lost that one.”_

_“Oh.” Malia turns back to the camera, lips pressed together in a failing attempt to hold in her laughter. “Whoops.”_

 

* * *

 

Scott turned to Derek, grinning at him in the glow of a softly setting sun, “You know what we should do?”

Derek grinned back at him. “Ask Malia Tate to retell our entire history totally wasted?”

“Oh, I was gonna say we should make another album and maybe go on tour with some of our best friends,” Scott said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Scott’s face lit up in excitement. “But we should definitely do that, too!”

Derek grinned. “Awesome.”

“Awesome.”

 

_“…And that’s the story of Alpha/Beta,” Malia finishes, hands clasped together. “That’s all that matters.”_

_“That is the worst story I have ever heard.”_

_Malia dropkicks her empty cup past the camera. A faint crack echoes, followed by a muffled, _‘_ Ow. _’_  “Well, you tell the story next time, Derek!”_

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone's curious about character details:
> 
>   * Alpha/Beta is a twosome band with Scott (vocals, guitar) and Derek (bass, lyrics) as the only official members.
>   * Stiles is their band manager, and used to drum for them during live shows in the early days.
>   * Malia is their touring drummer.
>   * Liam is their touring guitarist/keyboardist.
>   * Isaac Lahey is not part of Alpha/Beta, but is one of their labelmates and fronts a band whose name I haven't decided on yet. They've collaborated in the past and are good friends, as hinted at in "This Is A Love Song In My Own Way."
>   * Everyone (except the canon villains, probably) has a role in this universe and will be present in the longer fic, coming to an AO3 near you sometime this ~~summer~~ year. Sometime in 2015, probably.
> 

> 
> Come say [hi](http://pocketlass.tumblr.com)!


End file.
